When to Outsource Software Development

PSL has been outsourcing software development service for the past 15 years, and we’ve become intimately acquainted with the process for determining whether or not to outsource. The most common reasons why companies outsource:

01

The company or project is lacking in software development bandwidth, and need to scale an engineering team quickly to meet market pressure or a tight product deadline;

02

The company seeks to improve its cost structure by outsourcing its engineering tasks to parties in lower cost countries (hence they are effectively outsourcing by offshoring);

03

Because of the competitive nature of the industry, the company is unable to recruit the right talent or is unable to effectively retain the right talent. Reasons for which it decides to retain a third party that has managed to recruit and train the right talent.

Whatever your reason, PSL is available to ensure you get the most out of your outsourcing engagement.

Closer is better Try nearshoring to Latin America to speed up innovation and achieve faster time to market.

¿Why PSL?

PSL goes beyond providing software development services from a nearshore model. As a purpose-driven Colombian company we are dedicated to transforming lives through the provision of advanced technology solutions.

Delivery-focused, agile approach

With over 15 years of agile experience, we adhere to agile principles, not one process in particular. We will work with you to adapt to your process while maintaining the successful tenants of agile.

Long-term engagements

We want to leverage expertise and momentum and that means investing in working together. We add more value to your organization when we commit to a longer term engagement.

Top-Tier Talent

1 in 10 is an expert in their field

1 in 5 teaches workshops, trainings, courses or classes, and

over 75% working with nearshore clients are bilingual

Nearshore Proximity

Close proximity makes daily collaboration with your team that much easier, and when it’s time for a visit, flight times are significantly shorter than Asia and Eastern Europe.

Robust Security Protocols

Information Security and Intellectual Property protection

Secure Communication Protocols

Secure Coding

Application Data Protection

Security Controls at 4 levels

System Redundancy and Fail-Tolerant Strategies

High-Technical Competency

We add value to projects that are complex and require a high-technical competency to get right. We love a good challenge, and we love creating impactful solutions. PSL is a community of continuous learners, and nothing offers more learning opportunities than challenging projects.

We deploy multidisciplinary, high-performance teams with nearshore proximity. Our teams become an extension of your development team, providing the expertise and scaling power needed to take your technology vision to the next level. Read more

DevOps engineers can help you design and implement continuous delivery pipelines and elastic applications. Our DevOps specialists help guide the adoption of foundational concepts, not just technologies. Read more

State-of-the-art cloud infrastructure translates to costs savings, elastic applications, and enhanced security and innovation. Our experts are available to consult, design, and build cloud architectures and help you get the most out of your cloud strategy. Read more

We embrace existing solutions and transform them. Our teams are experts in enhancing maintainability and streamlining the process of adding new features. We aim to provide faster time to market and improved business value. Read more

Frequently Asked Questions

PSL has a razor-sharp focus on software engineering, and is very selective in the type of engagements it ventures into, as a mechanism to ensure that we are adding value to the client and fulfilling our value proposition.

We work exclusively under Agile SCRUM & Kanban under a Time and Materials business model. We believe agile approximations compounded with a nearshore outsourcing deployment, provide both project velocity and monetary savings to the client in a way that is unparalleled in other software offshoring models

We only engage in long-term relationships with our clients. Only long term relationships are able to truly leverage the acquired know-how and team momentum that result in productive teams. Short term or “one off” projects, on the other hand, generate more overhead than value.

We train our teams intensively in sophisticated agile approaches to software development. These involve Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and DevOps. Thus, PSL is able to “marry” the velocity of agile with the discipline of conscientious software engineering (i.e. CMMi5) to create quality code that is highly maintainable and secure, and do so rapidly.

We deploy highly trained and highly monitored engineering teams with a marked methodology, culture and ethics. We do not do “body shopping”. Our teams are trained and are able to hold their ground with sophisticated engineers worldwide. They will have opinions, and will voice them respectfully and emphatically to achieve the best technical solution and user experience for the software.

PSL’s software outsourcing deployment methodology has been designed for fully remote nearshoring engagements. Under our methodology, PSL deploys a software engineering team in Latin America (Colombia and Mexico) that shares a time-zone (almost a full overlap) with US and Canada clients.

Although there are occasional trips to the client’s site in the US on the part of PSL’s engineering team, the majority of the work is done via nearshore outsourcing with constant remote communication with the client (via chat, videoconference, shared code repositories, e-mail, etc.).

Over the last 30 years, PSL has worked with companies of all sizes and business verticals. More than the size of the company, PSL focuses on the type of project to be deployed to be able to gauge the compatibility of our services with the client’s need. We tend to engage projects that have a high or medium-high technical complexity (either because of the application load, the newness and ambitiousness of the technology to be used, the challenge of the user experience design, or the criticality of information security for the project, among others).

We are an agile SCRUM shop, and hence are able to work with clients that are already agile themselves, or are seriously considering giving agile methodologies a try (in the latter case we will guide them by the hand to help introduce agile to their organization). We only work in certain technologies and platforms that we consider ourselves experts in (i.e. Java, C#, iOS, Android, Node.js, Angular, etc.)

if your technology need does not match our expertise, we will not try to sell you our services, but respectfully decline to engage (it is the only responsible thing to do!) We never engage in projects where we believe there is an ethical risk, and are meticulously careful with the security of your IP and data (we have worked with some of the world’s pre-eminent government agencies in projects of high security, and have a reputation to uphold, and are ISO27001 assessed and certified since 2010).

PSL personalizes every engagement with its clients. Hence, the specific roles of the software development team to be deployed will depend on the nature of the software outsourcing project, and the required technology to execute it. The seniority of every member of the team is also tailored to achieve the best possible blended rate for the complexity of the task at hand.

PSL believes it is always best to err on the side of seniority, and will always deploy teams that include at least one or several senior engineers (not doing so might put the totality of the project at risk of “rookie mistakes”). When selecting a team, PSL will present multiple candidates for each position to the client, allowing the client to select the person they believe is a best fit for each role (if for any reason an engineer is not performing to expectations, PSL will change it).

In short time, PSL’s human resources department will learn to understand the characteristics that each client values most in the team it wants deployed, increasing the satisfaction of the client with the engineers we assign to any given team.

PSL deploys nearshore outsourcing teams that are bilingual (english - spanish) and ensures they are able to effectively communicate with the client at all times and under all project situations (otherwise the success of the project may be put at jeopardy). PSL is careful that all team leads (i.e. an engineering lead, or a business functionality lead, for example) be specially articulate when speaking english, to make sure that critical project information “is not lost in translation”.

In any case, the specific fluency of each project team-member is accorded with the client (i.e. sometimes a key team member may be only conversant in english, but have the technical chops that are needed for the success of the project, and hence it may make sense to incorporate him or her on the team also, despite the person’s english being intermediate in level).

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About PSL

We are a purpose-led software company with 33 years of experience and over 700 driven and passionate engineers. PSL partners with its clients from nearshore locations to help them succeed on their most complex software development challenges. We deliver world-class quality software using agile processes and real-time interaction with our clients. Read more